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Prompted by a passing thought about TextMate, I thought I’d make a comprehensive, accurate, unbiased, and irrefutable survey of text editors by way of comparison to locations in The Lord of the Rings. TextMate: Minas Tirith A quiet, long-overlooked land populated by simple folk who keep mostly to themselves. They are somewhat set in their

I’ve written a few times before about how to choose the software you work with, and what you should and should not care about when making those choices. I maintain a page with various resources related to this, if you’re interested, most notably the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences. A revised version of

The folks at IPE at UNC have produced this nice animated gif of some network data on increasing financial integration in the run-up to the 2008 crisis. They used a small trick I pointed to a while ago (just using a pipe, nothing fancy) that lets you generate the gif from within R without tediously

Because the next official release of Emacs will finally have a built-in package management system, I’ve been able to update the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences to make it easier to set up. AucTeX is now installed directly as a package, and so is ESS. While the AucTeX package is official, I host

More starter kit stuff. Up till now, the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences included ESS, but bundled it with the git repo. A better option would be to have it installed via the package mechanism, like AucTeX is now, but it’s not included. The ELPA system is allows you to specify repositories besides

New in nerdery this week, it’s now a bit easier to install the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences that I put together (based on lots of great work by Phil Hagelberg and, more recently, Eric Schulte). In the past, the fact that AucTeX was both necessary and had to be compiled locally made

If you use Emacs and ESS to run R, then here’s a nice tweak I found on the Emacs Wiki. The following bit of elisp goes in your .emacs file (or equivalent). Starting with an R file in the buffer, hitting shift-enter vertically splits the window and starts R in the right-side buffer. If R